Concept for Generating Energy Demand in Electric Vehicles with a Model Based Approach

Hybrid energy storage systems (HESS) for electric vehicles, which consist of lithium-ion batteries and supercapacitors, have become an increasing focus of research and development in recent years. The combination of the two combines the advantages of each storage technology (high energy density in batteries and high power density in supercapacitors) in one system. To effectively manage the energy flow between these two different storage technologies, an intelligent energy management system (EMS) is required. In the development of the EMS, it is usual to run preliminary checks in a simulation environment that is as close to reality as feasible already during the development process. For this purpose, this paper presents a concept for the creation of a simulation environment consisting of realistic routes and a holistic vehicle model. The realistic route data are generated by a route-generating algorithm, which accesses different map services via application programming interfaces (API) and retrieves real route data to generate a simulated route. By integrating further online services (e.g., OpenWeather API), the routes are further specified with, for example, real weather data, traffic data, speed limits and altitude data. For the complete vehicle model, components including the suspension, chassis and auxiliary consumers are simulated as blackbox models. The components that can be accessed during the simulation are simulated as white box models. These are the battery, the supercapacitor, the DC/DC converter and the electric motor. This allows the EMS to control and regulate the HESS in real time during the simulation. To validate the simulation environment presented here, a real BMW i3 was driven on a real route, and its energy demand was measured. The same route was simulated in the simulation environment with environmental conditions that were as realistic as feasible (traffic volume, traffic facilities, weather) and the vehicle model of the BMW i3. The resulting energy demand from the simulation was recorded. The results show that the simulated energy consumption value differs by only 1.92% from the real measured value. This demonstrates the accuracy of the simulation environment presented here.